The Internet of Things refers to uniquely identifiable objects and their virtual representations in an internet-like structure. If all objects and people in daily life were equipped with identifiers, they could be managed and inventoried by computers. Much speculation has focused on the tagging of things using for example radio frequency identification (RFID) and technologies such as near field communication, barcodes, quick-response (QR) codes and digital watermarking.
Equipping all objects in the world with minuscule identifying devices or machine-readable identifiers could be transform daily life. For instance, business may no longer run out of stock or generate waste products, as involved parties would know which products are required and consumed. Users could interact with devices remotely based on present or future needs.
However this bold vision is faced with a plethora of practical challenges. For example, it is not clear how, in practice the architecture would look and be operated so as to be safely controlled. It is not clear how devices producing data feeds and requestors consuming data feeds would be connected in a trusted manner. For example, requestors would have little or no information on the true identity or integrity of remote devices or the quality of the data they produce. Likewise conventional web based architectures and protocols would be vulnerable to security breaches and attacks, for example attacks in which requestors or devices pretend to be something they are not, and, denial of service attacks.